In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

One Kilobot is not very smart. Each quarter-sized bot scuffles along on three rigid legs and can communicate only with its neighbors. Yet by instructing more than 1,000 Kilobots to follow a few simple rules, computer scientist Radhika Nagpal and her team at Harvard can get the crude bots to assemble into multiple shapes — including a wrench (left), a star and the letter K — without human intervention.

The demonstration, reported in the Aug. 15 Science, is the closest scientists have come to mimicking cooperative swarms in nature, such as ants that clump together to form makeshift rafts (SN

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